


The Last Toast

by blueincandescence



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Nothing too gruesome or graphic but ♪ “Hello darkness, my old friend…” ♪
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-08-15 00:08:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8034334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueincandescence/pseuds/blueincandescence
Summary: An AU where Leviathan (aka Soviet HYDRA) is active, capturing Bruce shortly after becoming the Hulk to restart a Red Room-like initiative that Children’s War-era Natasha takes exception to.





	The Last Toast

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt — brucenat + burn & combining AU and hurt/comfort prompts from a Hulkwidow challenge last summer
> 
> One of my favorite minor characters in literature is the seamstress girl from the end of A Tale of Two Cities if that tells you anything about how this is going to go. Apologies all around.

The metallic fetor of blood rouses him. In the grout between mint green tiles, rivulets of red have spread to pool under his slackened face. With numb and shaking muscles, Bruce props himself half onto his elbows. How long has he been on the floor? He remembers soundless gunfire, the smell, the light. He remembers red and black, and white coats slumping over. Dr. Kudrin is facedown at arm’s length, a single bullet wound marring her back. Her pallid skin is cool to the touch. Beginning stages of algor mortis puts time of death at thirty, forty minutes.

Bruce casts around the haze of the room, looking for jackboots. No, no, if it were Ross he’d be in a container in a helicopter bound for another cage. Someone else took the base. Someone else killed all three butchers in the room, left him drugged and naked. Exposed. But breathing. Whoever they were, they’d come for the girls or they’d come for Leviathan. Not him. Not yet. The cavernous hall is empty.

Quiet, as far as he can tell. The roar in his ears is only now subsiding. Electricity shorts and sparks from the slipshod equipment around him. Pain occurs to him the way his thoughts do, slow and blunt. Had he heard the glass breaking? Shards puncture his skin, the sensation stopping at his belly.

Twisting, he raises up to get a look at his legs, pale and shriveled by captivity. Irregular spasticity of the muscles. Partial paralysis to the posterior cord. Implying damage to the dorsal column-medial lemniscus pathway, specifically the somatic sensory cortex. In all probability not the intended target of the interrupted lobotomy. But who knows. The weeks — days, years — he spent strapped to the overturned gurney he crawls from have not instilled in him a great respect for the Russian mad sciences. Too emotional.

He wills his forearms to drag the deadweight of his body toward the twin smears of blood he leaves as a trail for himself. A gun lays abandoned near the open doorway. By his bleary-eyed estimate two more strong drags and the gun will be in his hand, his finger on the trigger. He knows how the weight of the metal will feel against his teeth. He knows the bullet will burn his tongue in the microseconds before his monster spits it out. He is a survivor against his will.

His nostrils flare against the stench of antiseptic and vodka and recent corpses. Russians have lifetimes worth of toasts to such ironic cruelties. Bruce remembers fragments from his long journey crossing a continent to Siberia. За злую жизнь мою — _And to my life in hell_.

Elbows straight, he drags himself again. A groan escapes his cracked lips. He curls in on his gut, forcing two deep breaths before he pulls out a sliver of glass from his left iliac region. The shard is marked with a green label. Zelyonaya Marka. Mid-priced vodka. The good doctor Kudrin and her attending psychopaths had not been motivated by money. The worst monsters never were. He never was.

Vision swimming, he turns back toward the gun. Three pairs of small bare feet framed by the doorway freeze him in place. The pair in the middle only skim the ground. Veins protrude from underneath delicate skin, taut and green-tinged. The veins of the two taller girls holding her up are as flat and blue as his own are, clogged for the time being with chemical suppressants. Three young girls with features haunted by dark circles. He wanted to be the man who cured death; their captors wanted to wield it. Evil came of their meddling, either way.

The tallest of the girls speaks. He recognizes the word for ‘medicine,’ the word for ‘friend.’ His eyes fall back to the dying girl’s feet. Why had he walked away from gamma experimentation? What had given him the right?

“Нет, нет лекарства.” _No medicine_ , no cure.

His blood is poison. He’d been so careful with it. Eighteen long months. His blood is temptation, Promethean fire. If she leaves — if any of them are found — he’ll never get it back. They’ll siphon it from their corpses. His blood. His monster.

The gun is in reach.

“Запустить,” he rasps, his accent pathetic even in life or death. Theirs not his. He can’t trust himself with lesser evils. _Run_.

“Огонь приходит,” the tallest girl tells him. _Fire is coming_. The haze in the room suddenly makes sense. The girls adjust their grip on their gamma poisoned friend. The tallest girl, over her shoulder, throws, “так она,” before they rush back into the dark hallway.

_So is she._

Bruce remembers red and black. A warning or a reassurance?

He grasps the gun. Using the handle as leverage, he lumbers himself upright and arranges his legs. The gun is cocked and ready. But he waits, giving the girls as long possible to evacuate. His monster, as silent has he is at the moment, will tear this hellhole down cinder block by cinder block. And he, as void of self-preservation as he is, will not allow himself to be taken again. A bullet means an almost instantaneous transformation, the one small mercy he grants his bruised and broken body. That he’s suffered enough is an almost novel thought to occur to him.

He licks his lips, the taste of iron on his dried out tongue. Across the room, peeking out of an open cabinet, are rows of Zelyonaya Marka.

“Shoulda asked for a bottle, Banner.” Muttered on a wheeze.

A rustle at the doorway.

She steps through, the woman whose red bangs cut a shadow across her eyes. The Slavic Shadow. The Red Death. The Black Widow.

Unscrupulous men in unsavory bars raised toasts to her ass, her kills. A legend.

The bundle in her arms appears to be trembling, but it’s a trick of his vision. The Widow’s arms are trembling; the dying girl is dead. Gamma poisoned blood splatters on the tile, dripping from the hole in the back of her head.

Rage wakes up in his gut. He’d thought of killing the girl to kill the poison, and the shame of that brutal logic burns in him anew. _Run_ , he said instead. This world is not one that rewards selfless acts.

The Widow crosses the room to set girl beneath the cabinet of vodka. Her pale hands still shaking, she shatters glass to douse the body.

His hands shake, too, when he lifts the gun. The Widow flicks her eyes toward him for the first time. Her expression is cold, different from his picture of a killer’s eyes — raging red hot, _Look what you made me do_. But he reasons that assassins are a different breed.

Her cold eyes lift. Whatever she’s decided about him allows her to turn her back, crouch down to close the girl’s lids. Offer a hissing whisper. What he can hear of her voice trembles, too.

Rage, he thinks. The Widow killed the girl — maybe a dozen girls with green in their veins and will make sure their bodies burn. Because he had brought a new kind of evil into the world, and some cruel twist of fate made it her job to take some of it out.

Bruce came to Siberia to drink and freeze. To avoid the obvious. There was no such thing as redemption, only lesser evils. He’s known that all his life.

The Widow slips over to the lab equipment. The body of Dr. Kudrin flops onto the floor when the Widow shoves it over. He catches the word for ‘quick’ on her grunt. Too quick, he infers. Bullet to the heart. No suffering.

She gets to work on the IV stand. She’s wearing black jeans and a midriff-baring black sweater that gleams in the fluorescent haze. From a little black backpack straight out of the 90s, she takes out a thick gray box from which she gently lifts a medical pouch encasing a pale-greenish yellow liquid. As she reattaches the line, her brow furrows in concentration.

Bruce’s brain, still so used to the mundane despite all experience to the contrary, maps onto her face the lives of any of his Bio 101 students. Suddenly, the Widow is a girl not a decade older than the ones she’s freed from this hell. Suddenly, he remembers they could have been people.

Before he speaks, he covers himself with his hands and forces muscles lax with disuse into something like a grim smile. “You know,” he croaks. It’s English because he lacks the saliva for Russian vowels. And because he wants to be understood, to understand. She shot at everyone in this room but him. “For a woman who’s supposed to have made her first kill in the 1940s, you’re awfully young.”

The Widow’s expression flattens to nothing. He’s being ignored. That’s something.

“Must be one hell of a serum,” he presses. “What’s the secret? It’s not gamma radiation.”

Heeled leather boots not slipping once on the blood-streaked floor, she rolls the IV to him. He doesn’t put up even a token struggle when she takes hold of his arm to push the needle back into his vein.

Swallowing his wince, he closes his eyes and lets the numbness seep into his limbs. “You brought your own sedatives. Smart. I, uh, assume everyone else in the whole place is dead.” There’s more blood soaked into her clothes than he realized. They reek of iron and lighter fuel and smoke.

“Just you and me.” Her voice is a low, soothing rasp, her accent American classic. He supposes spies have to know how to do a lot more than kill. She crouches next to him, taking his face into her hands. She’s examining his eyes. The color. The spy has done her homework.

“And the bastard who — ” He swallows. Ivan Petrovich Bezukhov. Ivan the Caretaker. He came the first day of his captivity. He told him his plan for his girls. He invited him to participate willingly. A lick of anger ignites in the recesses his hindbrain. “Is he dead? What kind of monster starts a children’s war — ”

Her eyes are green, he notices, when they shift to look at him instead of through him. Green and bottomless. “I did.” Her tone has the air of a confession, the finality of promise. The Children’s War, they called it. It never crossed his mind that the children could have started it.

She’s searching his eyes again. “When you’re not the monster,” the Widows says, “Who are you?”

He looks down. His flesh has a deathlike pallor, his blood a vibrant sheen. She did her homework on the monster, not on him. His legacy. “Bruce Banner.”

“Mr. Banner — ”

“Dr. Banner.” His lips quirk. “I have two PhDs, thank you.”

Glass crunches against denim as she kneels. She takes the gun from the floor and places it on her lap. Her cold fingers brush his shoulders once, then again before they settle, feather-light, onto his skin. She holds his gaze again. “Do you want me to kill you, Dr. Banner? Because I don’t think you can be saved.”

His eyes burn. Her words, the vacancy in her expression, the darkening smoke — whatever it is, his eyes burn with shame and anger and bitter longing. “Yes. Yes, but you can’t. I know. I’ve tried.”

The slight upturn of her lip is almost kind. “I haven’t.”

He answers the softness in her smile. “The Black Widow.” He decides to believe her, to hope for lesser evils. “How will you do it?”

She sits back on her heels. He thinks of Betty, who sat like that when she was listening, who was about that young when they first met. The Widow regards him for a long moment, then shrugs. She taps the IV pole, touch light. “Your irradiated blood cells are soaking in pure chlorine trifluoride. In approximately ten minutes, when your blood has coagulated and the fire has reached this room, your body will ignite. Almost instantaneously, your physical remains will be nothing more than microscopic ash.”

Is that pride he hears? He supposes all kinds of killers have regarded their work as art. Hers is a genius that surpasses his own in this area. He once considered laying his neck across a train track, but the thought alone had triggered the monster.

The Widow palms the gun. Smiles again. It’s charming, for all that it’s macabre. Her voice is strangely earnest. “I’ll make sure you’re unconscious.”

“Why?” He’s been naked this whole time, but now he is exposed as she considers his question, considers him.

The curve of her lip twists into something bitter, something like revulsion. But she reaches for him. Her touch is softer on his face than it was before. “You aren’t bad man. I know bad men.”

He wants to flinch away from the compassion she is drudging up for him. The compassion of a killer, his killer. Of a woman who was rumored to be one of Petrovich’s girls. Rumored to have killed the others, one by one. Funny, how easy it was to remember horror stories when they were told about beautiful things.

The Widow stands. “But what’s in your blood puts too many people at risk. I don’t think I need to persuade you of that.”

He hangs his head, doesn’t disagree. Yet, she’s entirely too human to him now. His belief is waning. “And what if the monster says no?”

She’s across the room when he glances up back up. Rifling through a cabinet. Her heel is on Dr. Kudrin’s hair. The Widow nudges the doctor’s slack face. “According to her records, you’ve been more than three weeks without so much as an adrenaline spike. I don’t think you’re gonna break that streak.”

He can’t find a glib reply, not with smoke rolling in and shifting the light. The Widow is a backlit angel of death.

“Who are you?” His head lulls.

The Widow catches him by the shoulders, eases him into her lap. “Natasha,” she says. Diminutives are endearments, and it lets him hope.

“Was it always like this?” He means this facility, her life, her war.

She seems to hesitate. Then her fingers are in his hair. “No. Where I was raised, there was ballet and music and pretty things made of marble.”

He’s glad she told him that. Thinks it might even be true. She hasn’t lied to him yet.

His head his so light, except where Natasha’s fingers stroke his scalp. The howling rage at the back of his mind is getting louder but hollower by the second. “It’s strange to get what you want.”

The bitter note to her laugh twists into something guttural and violent. The smoke is in his lungs, too, but he only has the strength to wheeze.

“Is your war over?”

“Wars don’t end,” she says. “Only people do.” The smoke has gotten to her eyes. Tears are dripping from her chin.

An end. That’s what she’s giving him. He never thought he’d see one.

“You should go.” He’s slurring his words. He’s almost there, and the room is hot.

“You’re not asleep.” Her voice is thick and her lips are close to his ear. Lower to the ground where the smoke must be thinner. “You need a lullaby?”

“Toast?” he suggests. To lesser evils. To better angels and the death of monsters. To purifying flame.

“Для мира,” Natasha says. Her voice is trembling again. As best she can do with shaking fingers, she gentles his head to rest the ground.

Bruce’s drift eyes close. Rage has left him. 

The last thing he feels is the softness of lips pressed to the tucked up corner of his own, and then Natasha leaves him alone in his mind.

_To peace._

**Author's Note:**

> Last Toast
> 
> I’m drinking to a ruined home,  
> And to my life in hell,  
> To us together, yet alone,  
> And to you as well, —
> 
> To lies of lips, betraying love,  
> That ice-cold deathly stare,  
> The world, so merciless and rough,  
> And God, who wasn’t there.
> 
> June 27, 1934  
> Sheremetev Palace
> 
> By Anna Akhmatova  
> Translation by Andrey Kneller


End file.
